AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

AI-driven incident response tools automatically inspect alerts, generate hypotheses, query telemetry, correlate deployments, and deploy fixes, reducing routine MTTR. However, routine automation limits engineers’ hands-on practice, leaving them ill-prepared for rare, high-severity incidents that require manual intervention. The article cites aviation pilots’ simulator training as a model, and Rootly’s partnership with Uptime Labs to create realistic software outage simulations that restore hands-on skill development.